'Damages'

"Damages," FX

Nomination Status: Emmy voters have always liked "Damages" more than ordinary viewers. Will that trend continue?

In Its Favor: "Damages" has been nominated for Outstanding Drama Series for each of its first two seasons, also picking up a handful of additional nominations each year. It would probably be foolish to assume that this won't be another big year for Glenn Close and company.

Working Against It: The FX's drama's overall viewership has continued to dwindle and even critical support began to fall off. Still, the show has a dedicated fanbase, however tiny. And that fanbase insists that expected-cancellation-be-damned, "Damages" was as good as ever this season. "Damages" could be the anti-"Good Wife" in this Emmy race, i.e. passionate miniscule fanbase trumping a far larger, less devoted fan base.

Breaking Bad is significantly better than Mad Men, which is significantly better than everything else. I loved this past season of Dexter, but there is nothing on the same level as AMC right now. I don't see how you can suggest the last season of Lost has nothing going against it. It created a fairly large and vocal former-fan base.

Still love Laurie, House. Must-see tv for me. The season opening and closing episodes were indeed especially brilliant, innovative, compelling. I'm looking for Laurie to get his well-deserved Emmy this year. The show is certainly built around his iconic character, but it's not less excellent for that. The writing is topnotch, the supporting cast superb and, despite people saying it is tired and formulaic, it does often break the formula, usually with great results. It's a hybrid show, I suppose because it's built on the procedural structure (and I wouldn't lose that: they still do some interesting things with it) and it has this amazing character study at the center of it. When people call it tired and formulaic I wonder if they have actually watched it enough

Also,as a network show, House produces 22-24 shows a year, which is a schedule very few of its competitors have to match. The level of writing, acting and production on that show with that schedule is truly worthy of recognition. Cherry pick the top 12 House episodes and give them twice the production time and I think you'd see some even more amazing stuff. Of course, I'm not really suggesting that because I enjoy as many as I can get.I'm not going to criticize the other shows because very few of them have engaged my interest enough to watch a representative sample.

And that's the problem with House right there. The opener, Wilson & Cuddy-centrics & the clsoing 2 episodes were all different from the usual, and they turned out to be the best episodes this past season. Yet the writers and such didn't seem to notice as they just went back to the usual routine thereafter.

House has been coasting since the end of Season 3. There is nothing redeeming or remotely interesting about this particular bunch of lackeys and the show is pretty much Patient A gets treated with medicines X, Y & Z before finally getting better. Lather, rinse, repeat.